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* Anatole Kaletsky: Associate Editor of The Times* Professor Norman Stone: Professor of International Relations and Director of the Russian Centre at Bilkent University, Ankara.* Alexei Pushkov: Anchor of the most popular Russian TV programme “Post Scriptum” which has considerable influence on Russian public perception of international events.

Speakers against the motion:

* Edward Lucas: Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for the The Economist and author of The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Both Russia and the West (2008).

Friday, July 24, 2009

Why the Polish and Czech presidents drag their feet over the Lisbon treaty

AFP

Klaus and Kaczynski, procrastinating presidents

AFTER being subject to commissars in Moscow, some east Europeans are twitchy about commissioners in Brussels. But that only partly explains the reluctance of two presidents, Poland’s Lech Kaczynski and the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Klaus, to sign the European Union’s Lisbon treaty, which both countries’ parliaments have ratified.

Both men are famously prickly and prone to nit-picking. Both frame their objections in the language of national sovereignty. Both hate to see Ireland bullied—it is being asked to vote again on Lisbon on October 2nd. Mr Kaczynski similarly disliked the sanctions briefly imposed by the EU on Austria when the right-wing Freedom Party was in government. Mr Klaus says the EU elite cannot accept dissenting views (when visiting European parliamentarians attacked his Euroscepticism he compared them to communist-style thought police).

But the differences are bigger than the similarities. Mr Kaczynski’s opposition to Lisbon is about posturing not principle. He says publicly that he is merely waiting for the second Irish referendum before signing. Given that he helped to negotiate the treaty on Poland’s behalf, it would be hard for him to demonise it as Mr Klaus does. Indeed, Mr Kaczynski, who worries about waxing Russian influence and a waning American presence, has described the EU as “a great thing”.

The real reason for the Polish president’s delay is a desire to annoy the government led by Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform party. Mr Tusk defeated the government led by Law and Justice, headed by the president’s twin, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, in 2007. Mr Tusk’s emollient, pro-EU stance contrasts sharply with the Kaczynskis’ abrasive style. A delay over Lisbon also allows the president to grandstand on the EU’s “moral relativism” (meaning the incompatibility of its views of human rights with Polish social mores on homosexuality and the like).

Mr Klaus says he will get around to Lisbon only once everyone else has endorsed it. He will probably sign, but through gritted teeth. He would like a loose free-trade zone instead of what he sees as a nascent superstate. Unlike Mr Kaczynski, he is no Atlanticist; he gets on quite well with Russia. Also unlike Mr Kaczynski, he has the excuse that, though Lisbon passed the Czech parliament in May, it faces a court challenge by politicians from the Civic Democratic party that Mr Klaus once led.

Euroscepticism has only limited appeal in eastern Europe. The EU is widely seen as a guarantor of stability and progress: generous in paying for modernisation of public services and infrastructure and the best hope for fighting corruption. Lisbon is widely backed not on its merits but because its failure would risk pushing the EU into yet another interminable internal debate.

A British historian argues that Hitler lost the war for the same reason that he unleashed it—because he was a Nazi

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. By Andrew Roberts. Allen Lane; 712 pages; £25. To be published in America by HarperCollins in 2011.

ONLY a highly confident historian would set out to write a one-volume history of the second world war. And only a highly accomplished one could produce a book that manages to be distinctive but not eccentric, comprehensive in scope but not cramped by detail, giving due weight both to the extraordinary personalities and to the blind economic and physical forces involved.

Andrew Roberts certainly does not lack confidence and his talents are well suited to the task. His speciality is the bold sweep of narrative history, marshalling hard facts and telling anecdotes to support big judgments. For modern academic historians, his work is a bit adventurous: far safer to narrow down research to, say, the study of medieval nail prices in rural Wales.

The big theme of his new book is the interplay between Hitler’s personality and Nazi Germany’s fortunes on the battlefield. In brief, Mr Roberts argues that the war started when it did because Hitler was a Nazi, and that Germany lost it for the same reason. The Nazi leader’s blunders started when he began to turn his anti- Semitic rhetoric into practice, driving many of Germany’s best brains into exile. The allies won because “our German scientists were better than their German scientists”, was the pithy summary of the war’s outcome by one of Churchill’s closest aides, Sir Ian Jacob. Excellent German engineering and ruthless use of forced labour was not enough to make up for the drain of so many clever people into exile or concentration camps. A conservative-nationalist war leadership, unshackled by Hitler’s lunatic prejudices, could have developed advanced weapons far faster, perhaps even cracking the atom.

Hitler also started the war rather too early. A bigger and better U-boat fleet, for example, could have starved and crippled Britain. Sometimes he dithered, allowing the British army to escape from Dunkirk in 1940. More often it was impatience that was ruinous. Had the Axis powers finished off the British in north Africa first, they could have attacked Russia from the south as well as the east. Hitler’s “stand or die” orders gravely hampered the war in the east once the tide turned. His gratuitous decision to declare war on the United States after Pearl Harbour was another catastrophe (he regarded America as a military weakling). His failure to encourage Japan to attack the Soviet Union was similarly disastrous.

Mr Roberts likes punchy pronouncements and there are some fine ones here. After Japan’s initial military successes, previously contemptuous outsiders changed their minds: “From being a bandy kneed, myopic, oriental midget in Western eyes, the Japanese soldier was suddenly transformed into an invincible, courageous superman.” On Hitler’s geeky knowledge of military hardware, which led him constantly to second-guess his generals, he writes: “Because a trainspotter can take down the number of a train in his notebook it doesn’t mean he can drive one.”

The author’s research brings to light some startling facts. Even war buffs may be surprised to learn that the supposedly supine Vichy regime in France executed German spies, or that more Frenchmen fought on the Axis side than with the Allies. A nutty British official in charge of Malta put Sabbath observance ahead of unloading ships, at terrible cost. Another nearly lost the vital battle for Kohima, the gateway to India, because he wanted to keep to peacetime rules restricting the use of barbed wire. Orde Wingate, the hero of the Chindits’ campaign in Burma, was an ardent nudist who never bathed. (He scrubbed himself with a stiff brush, instead.) Mr Roberts is the first historian to gain access to a huge trove of personal letters and other documents assembled over 35 years by Ian Sayer, a British transport tycoon. Extracts provide Mr Roberts with some of his most telling personal anecdotes.

The most controversial part of the book will be the author’s unflinching judgments about the great controversies of the war. He briskly defends dropping atom bombs on Japan; after Okinawa, the price of a conventional assault looked particularly hideous. A test detonation would have been folly. America had only two bombs, and it was the second that (narrowly) persuaded Japan to surrender. On the allied bombing of Dresden he assembles a formidable array of facts and arguments against the post-war second-guessers who see it as a war crime. He notes that a German bombing raid on Yugoslavia in 1941 killed nearly as many people. Few remember, or complain, about that.

On other issues, though, he is more counter-intuitive. He does not believe, for example, that the Soviet army’s inaction during the Warsaw uprising in 1944 was a cynical attempt to let the Nazis deal with the anticommunist Polish resistance: the real reason was that the Red Army’s lines of communication had been overstretched by its rapid advance westward.

Mr Roberts hops nimbly between the Pacific and the Atlantic, though Asian readers may feel a bit shortchanged: the fighting in China gets particularly short shrift. Again and again he chides his readers for overestimating the importance of famous British and American battles in the West and overlooking much larger ones on the eastern front: more than 2m Germans were killed in the east, over ten times the number who died fighting in the west. “Britain provided the time, Russia the blood, America the money and the weapons,” he concludes.

He presents stylish penmanship, gritty research and lucid reasoning, coupled with poignant and haunting detours into private lives ruined and shortened. Mr Roberts shows boyish pleasure and admiration at the great feats of arms he describes. But the underlying tones of this magnificent book are in a minor key: furious sorrow at the waste of it all.

A letter by east European luminaries to the American administration has attracted much attention. Here is what they could have said but didn’t.

Dear Mr President:

We are under no illusions about our region’s low standing on your to-do list. We know that the cold war is over and that your administration worries more about Asia than about Europe. We are grateful for what America has done in the past but we are not presumptuous about the future.

But we want to highlight our mutual interests more clearly, for both our sakes. Like you, we want an open, dynamic Europe, not a greying, inward-looking theme park. Like you (we hope) we want the European Union to be America's partner, not its rival. We also want our own countries to be beacons of good government, with high-quality public services, respect for citizens and with high standards of integrity in public life. That is good for us, good for the rest of the EU, and good for our eastern neighbours. If they see that the rule of law and political freedom bring results, the temptation to follow Russia’s authoritarian crony capitalism is less and the likelihood of them following our euro-atlantic orientation is greater. The biggest headache for the Kremlin would be success in Ukraine. Our soft power can help you with that.

We are aware of our shortcomings. Our countries have been complacent, particularly since joining the EU. Our political class has lost the public’s confidence. We have allowed the EU’s expansion to falter; it obsesses about tedious and irrelevant constitutional reforms, rather than dealing with big questions such as energy security and competitiveness. It is not surprising that you don’t take the EU as seriously as it takes itself.

So this is the first and last letter we are writing to you from “new Europe”, to use Dick Cheney’s ill-starred phrase. Our priority is to broaden our support out of the ex-communist ghetto: it doesn’t help you if Atlanticism is seen as the weakest EU members’ refuge. Some say that the real divide in Europe is north-south, not east-west. But that is unfair. Plenty of southern Europeans share our views. For our next letter, we aim to have signatories from every EU country.

We’d be delighted if you beefed up NATO and relaxed your pestilential visa regime in Poland. But we are not writing to whinge. We want to suggest practical issues where we can best succeed if we cooperate better. For starters: make it harder for corrupt businesses to do business anywhere in the civilised world. We would like to see the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development attack asset laundering with the same zeal that it has fought against money laundering.

Another idea is a more confident and united stance from the countries that believe in freedom and the rule of law. “Democracy promotion” lost its shine under your cack-handed, tin-eared predecessor. Your huge personal popularity gives it a second chance. We’d glad if the Warsaw-based Community of Democracies could help promote your ideas in countries where the people like them but the rulers don’t. We could start by mounting a challenge to the United Nations’ shamefully biased human rights committee.

We won’t bother you often. But we’re here when you need us.

Friday, July 17, 2009

The pragmatic argument for American engagementVOICES do not carry easily across the Atlantic. But when they belong to people like Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa, their message may be heard even in the noisy corridors of Washington, DC. The two best-known ex-communist leaders are among 21 signatories of an open letter to the Obama administration, urging it to rethink its policies towards central and eastern Europe.

The 21 are all strong Atlanticists, who remember America’s vital role in ending the evil empire and in anchoring the former captive nations in NATO. As well as seven former presidents (two from Poland, one each from Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Romania) the signatories include heavyweight politicians and officials, plus two of the region’s most insightful political analysts, Kadri Liik from Estonia and Ivan Krastev from Bulgaria.

Their main message is that the gains of the past 20 years are more fragile than they may seem. The letter speaks of a “growing sense of nervousness in the region” caused in part by the global economic crisis, and in part by worries about Russian assertiveness and the West’s feeble response. NATO seems weaker than when its new members joined; they doubt if it would come to their defence if needed. That (along with the cack-handed approach of the Bush administration) has eroded once-fervent Atlanticist sentiments. In short, if America and NATO lack the will to defend the eastern members, why should eastern European soldiers risk their lives in Afghanistan? Plunging defence budgets make that issue urgent.

A second worry is that the generation of leaders in the region who instinctively looked to America is moving out of public life (like, one might note, most of the signatories). Similarly, the upcoming generation of American politicians will not have spent their formative years goggling at Checkpoint Charlie in divided Berlin, or feeling their spirits soar at the courage and triumph of dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov.

In short, central and eastern Europe, whose nations once championed a strong relationship between their continent and America, could quickly become introverted, isolated and unhelpful. The United States, gripped by “realism”, would deal with the big issues in its relationship with Russia and increasingly neglect the countries in the Kremlin’s front yard.

The signatories want to revive the region’s relationship with America with two big moves. First, they want the new administration to explicitly commit itself to continued engagement in Europe, both in NATO and with the EU. Second, the signatories’ want their countries to lobby for Europe to have a more responsible and active relationship with America. That would mean, for example, a “renaissance” of NATO, with real contingency planning and a more united attitude to dealing with Russia.

It is all fine stuff. The administration’s eastern Europe policy is indeed worryingly vague. But the letter risks sounding plaintive and naïve. Supporting Mr Walesa in the 1980s was both a noble cause and helped speed the Soviet empire’s demise. But Russia does not pose the existential threat to America that Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union once did. Sadly, other stuff matters more. And it is strange to blame the West for complacency about the region: gloom would be a better word. “They are asking us, in principle, to risk world war three in their defence” a savvy American official said recently. “If their country stands for organised crime and economic collapse, that’s a hard sell”.

A better argument would be that the region’s renewed success would be the best long-term hope for change in Russia. Few things would worry the Kremlin more than proof that political freedom, the rule of law and sensible foreign policy work well in nearby countries.

Nabucco and other new gas pipelines may make Europe’s energy more secure, but market liberalisation matters too

TRAGEDY and farce have too often been the hallmarks of European efforts to improve energy security. Dependence on Russia, which supplied a third of its gas imports through Kremlin-controlled east-west pipelines, seemed to be rising inexorably and worryingly. Squabbling between Russia and Ukraine led to repeated supply cuts. The Russians exploited energy to divide and rule their Western neighbours. Big energy companies in countries such as Germany and Austria sought cosy relations with Russia’s state-controlled gas giant, Gazprom.

The overlap between politics and profit was epitomised by Gerhard Schröder, a former German chancellor. Since 2005 he has been the front man for Nord Stream, the pipeline that is planned to run under the Baltic. Along with South Stream, a sister project across the Black Sea, Nord Stream would let Russia bypass troublesome transit countries, chiefly Ukraine. West European customers could benefit, but the plans alarm countries in the east that are at greater risk of Russian bullying.

Now this gloomy picture is brightening. For a start, Europe has diversified its sources of supply: cost and unreliability have led Gazprom to lose a third of its European market to imports from Norway, Qatar and Trinidad, says Mikhail Korchemkin of East European Gas Analysis, a consultancy. Second, one of the European Union’s efforts to curb Russia’s transit monopoly is gaining traction. In a signing ceremony in Ankara on July 13th, the Nabucco pipeline, which will connect Europe to gas-rich Central Asia via the Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus, won formal backing from the main transit countries: Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey, as well as from Germany.

This step reflects a €200m ($283m) dollop of EU money, plus some political shifts. Turkey had earlier bargained toughly (some said destructively). The EU’s quiet expression of interest earlier this year in White Stream, a rival project across the Black Sea, may have changed Turkish minds. And Nabucco has hired Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister, as a consultant (see article).

Nabucco could carry some 30 billion cubic metres of gas a year. But that is only a fifth of what Russia exports to Europe; and it will not be finished until at least 2015. Moreover, the sources of that gas remain unclear. Azerbaijan has enough only for the project’s early stages, though it is exploiting new offshore gasfields. Iran would be a logical supplier, but is out of the question on political grounds. A promising newcomer is Iraq’s Kurdish region. In May a Western-backed consortium unveiled an $8 billion plan to extract gas there and sell it to Nabucco. This week Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s prime minister, said he could supply half the gas the pipeline needed.

But the biggest prize would be gas from Turkmenistan, a Central Asian dictatorship that claims to sit atop one of the world’s largest gas reserves. The Turkmen leadership is hesitant about annoying the Kremlin, which now buys all of the country’s exports to make up for Russia’s own flagging gas production. But an EU-backed negotiating consortium has made some progress in talks with Turkmenistan. President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov recently announced that his country had a surplus of natural gas “available to foreign customers, including Nabucco”.

That would, however, require a new pipeline under the Caspian Sea, which would not only be costly and slow but also subject to objections from Russia and Iran (which would like to offer a land-based route instead). Russia is the only serious naval power in the Caspian. It showed in last August’s war with Georgia that it is prepared to use military force to protect its interests in the neighbourhood.

An American delegation, including Barack Obama’s national security adviser on the region, Michael McFaul, has just been to Turkmenistan to stress the importance the West puts on making Nabucco a success. American lobbying proved crucial to the success of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that runs from Azerbaijan to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, which opened in 2005. Many thought that was a pipe dream in the beginning, but with strong political backing it came to acquire an aura of inevitability. Nabucco’s backers hope to repeat the BTC pipeline’s trick.

Other less ambitious pipelines are also moving ahead. ITGI, which aims to bring Azeri gas to Italy via Turkey and Greece, has just announced a deal to extend a spur north to Bulgaria, ending that country’s near-total reliance on Russian gas. Another EU-backed scheme, the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline, has signed up gas from Iran and expects to draw on Azerbaijan too.

Russia has not given up. Gazprom has just signed a $2.5 billion deal with Nigeria (it was named Nigaz, showing a refreshing ignorance of politically incorrect language). It is pressing on with the Opal pipeline to connect Nord Stream to an existing transit point on the German-Czech border. Germany, controversially, has given the scheme a 25-year monopoly. But other bits of the Kremlin’s energy diplomacy show patchy results. Attempts to build an international gas cartel have stalled. Plans for a push into liquefied natural gas look unrealistic. Most recently, a row with Turkmenistan has hit Russia’s gas imports.

Corruption, incompetence and state interference have long held back Russia’s gas industry. Production is falling. Russia has brought only one new gasfield on stream since the collapse of the Soviet Union and new reserves are in costly, distant regions. Even before the oil price fell (bringing down the gas price too), Gazprom had the highest costs and worst finances of any international gas company. With debts of over $40 billion, it will struggle to afford projects that make political sense, but cannot pay their way. That is how Nord Stream (cost up to €13 billion) and South Stream (€20 billion) increasingly look. Alan Riley, a British academic specialising in competition law, thinks both projects may also breach EU anti-monopoly rules.

That is a more serious threat as EU energy-market liberalisation takes hold. So far Germany, France and others have fought to protect national energy champions. But the European Commission wants more liberalisation and better interconnections. On July 8th it fined two energy giants, Germany’s E.ON and GDF Suez of France, €553m apiece for a market-sharing agreement involving Russian gas. It may yet look into whether Gazprom’s Opal monopoly and its contract bans on re-export of gas are legal. “The commission is trying to achieve through litigation what it couldn’t achieve through legislation,” says Pierre Noël, a French energy analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Boring energy liberalisation may be a surer route to energy security than glamorous pipelines.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Despite Russia's protests, Stalin was no less villainous than HitlerIT IS depressing that it even needed to be discussed. On July 3rd in Vilnius the parliamentary assembly of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the continent’s main outfit, passed a resolution equating Stalin and Hitler. It called for August 23rd to become an official day of remembrance for the millions who were repressed, murdered, deported, robbed and raped as a result of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. That deal, and the secret protocols that went with it, were a death sentence for the countries from the Baltic to the Black sea. The poisonous after-effects linger until today.

The resolution should have met with particularly thunderous applause from the Russian side. After all, Russians by most measures suffered particularly badly under Stalin. Following Lenin’s terrible legacy, he systematised the persecution of the country’s brightest and best. Anyone reading the classic memoirs of Stalinism, such as “Kolyma tales” by Varlam Shalamov, or Nadezhda Mandelstam’s “Hope against hope”, or a modern history such as Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag”, is suffused with the horror of those years. It is hard to imagine anyone quibbling over their condemnation.

Some do counter that Stalin was, despite his excessive toughness, a great figure in Russian and Soviet history. (Modern Russian history textbooks make the same case.) But that ignores Stalin’s disastrous record as a political and military leader. His paranoia decapitated the Red Army leadership: the best generals were murdered or jailed. Also, Stalin ignored the plentiful warnings of Hitler’s planned surprise attack in June 1941. That nearly proved disastrous.

By some counts Stalin should be seen as no less villainous than Hitler. He bears much of the blame for the war. It was the Soviet alliance with Hitler that gave the Nazi leader the confidence to attack Poland. Only Hitler’s blunders prevented the Nazis from winning the war in the East—and quite likely the whole show. It is also worth remembering that Stalinism was so repellent that it drove many Russians to fight on the Nazi side—including in the SS.

Plenty of other countries have much to be ashamed of in their wartime history. Britain’s bullying of Czechoslovakia to accept dismemberment at Nazi hands in 1938 is one good example; French collaboration with the occupation another. These are shameful, but they are not taboos.

By contrast, the OSCE resolution prompted outrage from Russia. Indeed, under the new law criminalising the “falsification of history”, anyone who voted for it, discussed it or publicised it in Russia would risk a jail sentence of up to five years. Communism’s economic failure and political repression have made it hard for anyone to claim that the Soviet Union was the epitome of a new civilisation. The victory over Nazi Germany provides some moral weight, but does not excuse Stalinism. The heroism of the Soviet soldiers who repelled the Nazi invaders has been used both to sanitise the past and to distract attention from the sleaze and incompetence of Russia’s current rulers.

The debate will not change the world: the parliamentary assembly is just a talking shop on the sidelines of the 56-member OSCE. Its resolutions are not legally binding. But the news is welcome nonetheless. Russian propagandists love using historical slogans but hate discussions of historical facts. The debate in Vilnius makes it a bit harder to maintain that stance.

Eastern Europe watches nervously as America improves relations with RussiaWHEN he returns home, a routine task in President Barack Obama’s in-box will be to proclaim the third week of July “Captive Nations Week”. Established by Congress in 1959 to show American solidarity with countries trapped inside the Soviet empire, it amounts nowadays to little more than a press release and a couple of parties. But it echoes a decades-old American commitment to the region’s freedom and security, sealed by NATO’s expansion to include 12 ex-communist countries.

That has created both loyalty and expectations. Eastern Europe sent troops uncomplainingly to Iraq. Several countries have soldiers in Afghanistan: indeed, some smaller ones have suffered remarkably high casualties there, largely unacknowledged by their bigger allies. And Poland and the Czech Republic agreed to host a new missile-defence system to counter a possible threat from Iran. This irks the Kremlin, which claims to fear American encroachment in its own backyard.

The east Europeans find Mr Obama an easier ally than his predecessor, George Bush. They are broadly pleased with his trip to Moscow. Unlike Mr Bush, who looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and got “a sense of his soul”, Mr Obama was not gulled into giving Russian leaders cloying praise. He brushed off attempts to trade influence in eastern Europe for help on issues such as Iran.

But on eastern Europe’s own future, the new administration’s touch is less sure. It is giving out mixed signals on the missile-defence deal signed by its predecessor. Polish and Czech leaders who argued in favour of the scheme feel exposed. One says, disapprovingly, that America’s wobbles are “unimperial”. Even tacit linkage between delaying or scrapping the scheme and pleasing Russia will heighten those worries.

Talks on a plan to put a battery of Patriot air-defence missiles in Poland are bogged down in arguments over cost, whether they will be armed and the legal and tax status of the Americans who come with them. Promises of help to modernise the Polish armed forces (“we provide the boys, you provide the boots” as a Polish official once put it) have proved frustratingly empty.

The region’s biggest fear is the health and credibility of NATO. The new members want the alliance to work on proper military planning, explicitly taking Russia into account as a potential threat as well as a partner. That has been taboo since the early 1990s and is opposed by some west European countries with close business ties to Russia. But such issues are low down the White House’s to-do list. “Obama doesn’t have a Europe policy. But neither does Europe,” says an east European leader wryly.

Eastern Europe watches nervously as America improves relations with RussiaWHEN he returns home, a routine task in President Barack Obama’s in-box will be to proclaim the third week of July “Captive Nations Week”. Established by Congress in 1959 to show American solidarity with countries trapped inside the Soviet empire, it amounts nowadays to little more than a press release and a couple of parties. But it echoes a decades-old American commitment to the region’s freedom and security, sealed by NATO’s expansion to include 12 ex-communist countries.

That has created both loyalty and expectations. Eastern Europe sent troops uncomplainingly to Iraq. Several countries have soldiers in Afghanistan: indeed, some smaller ones have suffered remarkably high casualties there, largely unacknowledged by their bigger allies. And Poland and the Czech Republic agreed to host a new missile-defence system to counter a possible threat from Iran. This irks the Kremlin, which claims to fear American encroachment in its own backyard.

The east Europeans find Mr Obama an easier ally than his predecessor, George Bush. They are broadly pleased with his trip to Moscow. Unlike Mr Bush, who looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and got “a sense of his soul”, Mr Obama was not gulled into giving Russian leaders cloying praise. He brushed off attempts to trade influence in eastern Europe for help on issues such as Iran.

But on eastern Europe’s own future, the new administration’s touch is less sure. It is giving out mixed signals on the missile-defence deal signed by its predecessor. Polish and Czech leaders who argued in favour of the scheme feel exposed. One says, disapprovingly, that America’s wobbles are “unimperial”. Even tacit linkage between delaying or scrapping the scheme and pleasing Russia will heighten those worries.

Talks on a plan to put a battery of Patriot air-defence missiles in Poland are bogged down in arguments over cost, whether they will be armed and the legal and tax status of the Americans who come with them. Promises of help to modernise the Polish armed forces (“we provide the boys, you provide the boots” as a Polish official once put it) have proved frustratingly empty.

The region’s biggest fear is the health and credibility of NATO. The new members want the alliance to work on proper military planning, explicitly taking Russia into account as a potential threat as well as a partner. That has been taboo since the early 1990s and is opposed by some west European countries with close business ties to Russia. But such issues are low down the White House’s to-do list. “Obama doesn’t have a Europe policy. But neither does Europe,” says an east European leader wryly.

THE Soviet Union was a prison, especially for the lively minded, whose travel abroad and activities at home were dictated by the Communist Party’s cultural commissars. But in the period between the end of the Stalin terror and the start of the Brezhnev era’s grim stagnation, a lucky few enjoyed some wisps of freedom.

Cultural continuity between that period and a lost past is the central theme of “Zhivago’s Children”. The metaphorical reference is to Tanya, the child of Yuri and Lara Zhivago in Boris Pasternak’s great novel. Brought up by peasants, “she has no opportunity to inherit the tradition of free-thinking, spirituality and creativity that her father embodied.” How will she turn out? The novel leaves that fictional question unanswered. Vladislav Zubok’s book shows, with great sympathy and insight, what happened to Tanya’s real-life counterparts.

The Zhivago legacy is Russia’s “silver age”, when Anna Akhmatova, a poet, and Vasily Kandinsky, a painter, as well as others, flowered towards the end of the tsarist era and in the emancipated years immediately after the Bolshevik revolution. But Stalin, who liked uplifting stories and pictures featuring combine harvesters, banned their work as subversive and decadent. Many perished in the murderous frenzy of the 1930s. Yet enough survived to preserve at least some of the knowledge and traditions of the past.

The huge expansion of Soviet higher education after the war was supposed to create docile “cultural cadres”. What emerged were young people, marked by “boundless, sparkling optimism”, proud of their country’s achievements but open-minded to its failings. After Stalin’s death, their independent thought and behaviour became “oxygenated”. Tight-knit circles of friends, kompany in Russian, discussed love, life, letters and more. In one such group the young Mikhail Gorbachev struck up an instant, passionate and lifelong liaison with a bright culture-vulture called Raisa.

Writers such as Pasternak and Akhmatova were privately revered in these circles. But the real thaw began under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. The World Youth Festival in Moscow in 1957 produced an orgy, sometimes literally, of contacts with thousands of visiting foreigners including from the capitalist West. In a society where such meetings had been as unlikely as a total solar eclipse, that had a huge impact. So did a freer press: the hard-hitting mass-market newspaper, Izvestia, and brainy, liberal-minded periodicals such as Novy Mir. As cultural iconoclasm swelled, Stalinist clichés (and the hacks who produced them) began to tumble.

Other controversies raged too, such as “lyrics v physics”. One camp believed that science would perfect society. The other sought answers from art and literature. Disagreement over that ended friendships and marriages. As the mental wounds of terror and war began to heal, the hardy survivors of the 1930s began to speak more freely to their young counterparts. Growing knowledge of the lies and crimes of the past barely shook the new intelligentsia’s faith in the Soviet system. Their world view was still Marxist, their patriotism genuine. Yet in their self-awareness and sense of mission, Zhivago’s children began to resemble the Russian intelligentsia of a century before.

Mr Zubok poignantly details the lengthy and bitter decline that followed. The earthy Khrushchev resented the cultural elite’s pretensions. Party bureaucrats saw them as subversive. The crushing of the Prague Spring destroyed faith in the Soviet system, and the intelligentsia splintered. A growing camp favoured Russian traditions and even chauvinism, denouncing the others as disloyal and cosmopolitan (and Jewish). Some writers collaborated out of cowardice or cynicism; others emigrated. A lonely few became dissidents, focusing intensely on support from the West, largely detached from everyday life in their own country. Similar divisions remain in Russia now.

The picture Mr Zubok paints so painstakingly is vivid. Yet it is only a tiny corner of the dreary canvas of Soviet life. A few thousand people in Moscow and St Petersburg had a nice and interesting time in the 1950s. But for many millions of their fellow-inmates, the Soviet decades were unrelievedly awful.

WHY did communism take root? Given its sorrowful harvest, why did it keep spreading? And what ever enabled it to last so long? Archie Brown’s new history of communism identifies three big questions, perhaps even the biggest, of the past century.

At first sight, all seem puzzling. Communism was an impractical mishmash of ideas, imposed by squabbling zealots that promised much, delivered little and cost millions of lives. It is striking that 36 countries at one time or another adopted this system and that five—Cuba, Laos, North Korea, Vietnam and the biggest of them all, China—still pay lip service to it.

Communism’s first big advantage was that it played on two human appetites—the noble desire for justice and the baser hunger for vengeance. Mr Brown, emeritus professor of politics at Oxford University, traces communism’s idealistic roots in the struggle against feudal oppression and beastly working conditions. The moral weight of Karl Marx’s criticisms of 19th-century capitalism even won him praise from the high priest of Western liberalism, Karl Popper, a Viennese-born philosopher who emigrated to London. But the intoxicating excitement of revolutionary shortcuts attracted the ruthless and dogmatic, who saw the chance to put into practice Marx’s muddled Utopian notions—and settle some scores on the way. “The more representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in killing, the better,” wrote Lenin in 1922. Even so, many still resist the idea that the founding fathers of communism were murderous maniacs. Revolutions against corrupt and ossified regimes in countries such as Russia and China stoked a steamy enthusiasm that took decades to dissipate.

The communist block also had two bits of good fortune. The economic slump of the 1930s discredited democracy and capitalism. Then came Hitler’s disastrous attack on the Soviet Union. The victory over fascism in Europe gave the Soviet Union, an ally of America and Britain, renewed moral weight. Given what had happened in Russia under Stalin in the 1930s, that hardly seemed deserved. As Mr Brown notes, Stalin trusted the Nazi leader more than he trusted his own generals. The Soviet Union killed more top German communists than Hitler’s regime did. Yet in some countries, Czechoslovakia for example, Soviet forces were initially welcomed as liberators, and Stalinist regimes took power with a degree of popular consent. In other countries, such as Poland and the Baltic states, it looked different: one occupation gave way to another.

The promised communist nirvana brought a mixture of mass murder, lies and latterly the grey reality of self-interested rule by authoritarian bureaucrats. But it was a bit late for second thoughts. Communist regimes proved remarkably durable, partly thanks to the use of privileges for the docile and intimidation of the independent-minded. Another source of strength was tight control of language and information that deemed most criticism unpatriotic. Cracks came as information spread, especially about the system’s bogus history and economic failings. Nationalism was a potent solvent too, particularly in places such as the Baltic states, that felt they were captive nations of a foreign empire.

Mr Brown deals conscientiously with communism in Asia and the solitary Latin American outpost of Cuba. But his main expertise, acquired over decades of scholarly study, is in the Soviet Union and its east European empire. His account is studded with delightfully pertinent and pithy personal observations and anecdotes: the censors in tsarist Russia decided that Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital” was so boring that it wasn’t worth banning. Lenin thought 1917 was too early for revolution in Russia. At the Battle of Stalingrad, 50,000 Soviet citizens, including turncoats, volunteers and conscripts, were fighting on the German side. An American communist agitator once began a speech with the immortal lines: “Workers and peasants of Brooklyn”. Nikita Khrushchev hated putting things in writing because he couldn’t spell.

It is easy to be polemical about communism. Mr Brown strives to be fair-minded. He gives careful weight to the achievements of the Soviet regime, particularly in bringing mass literacy to Russia, and unparalleled social mobility. But he is sometimes too lenient. Was the Soviet Union under Leonid Brezhnev really just an authoritarian regime, rather than a totalitarian one? Saying that the Soviet Union “repossessed” the Baltic states in the secret Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 would strike most people there as a glaring misreading of history. And his discussion of economics is skimpy and clichéd.

Yet as a single-volume account of mankind’s biggest mistake, Mr Brown’s book is hard to beat. Readers over the age of 40 will find it an uncomfortable reminder of a dangerous and dismal past. For most younger readers, it will seem all but unimaginable.

Last week’s column has aroused offence where none was meant. The aim—perhaps a bit fanciful, but it is summer after all—was to imagine menu items with names that reflect eastern Europe’s history and politics. Münchner Klöße [Munich dumplings], for example, would be a noxious dish cooked by Germans and force-fed to Czechoslovaks by Brits.

But readers saw it as a patronising outsider’s attack on east European cuisine in general. How dare a newspaper published in a country that invented the chip butty and the deep-fried Mars Bar mock the rich and varied cuisine of half a continent?

Vincents

Not your father's peasant food

At the risk of adding deliberate insult to unintended injury, the complaints do provide a peg to look at the region’s culinary highs and lows. Two big tests of national cuisine are whether the locals like it, and whether it exports. A simple way of measuring that is the incidence in a Google search of phrases such as “Albanian culinary classics” and “Estonian gourmet recipes” (zero in each case). That gives a rough guide to the level of interest in the English-speaking world in those countries’ national kitchens. Another Google test is compare the profile of each kind of ethnic restaurant in a big international city such as New York. So “italian restaurant” + “new york” brings up a mighty 2m hits, against 20,000 hits for “russian restaurant”, 33,500 for “polish”, 7,500 for “Hungarian” and so on. (Just for the record, “British restaurant” gets only 5,860.)

The presence of immigrant populations has an effect (you can find Lithuanian restaurants in Chicago, if rarely anywhere else). But the undeniable fact is that Italian (and French, Chinese, Indian, Tex-Mex, etc) cuisine has established itself as part of the global culinary landscape whereas the offerings from east European countries largely have not.

One reason is the isolation caused by 50 years of communism. (That also may explain the popularity of Georgian food within the Soviet Union, where it was the most exotic and tasty ethnic cuisine available.) Another is most countries’ recent roots in peasant farming. This created a need for cheap food that could support arduous manual labour: plenty of calories, fat and protein where possible, but not so well suited for a modern diner in search of taste sensations and a healthy diet.

A partial exception is Hungarian cuisine, which is not for those following a low-fat diet, yet still redolent of Hapsburg-era sophistication. But even that suffers from the biggest hole in the region's traditional repertoire: the summer menu. Hearty and delicious soups and stews are all very well when the wind is howling outside. But in the sweltering heat, a cold cabbage salad doesn’t quite do the trick. Two delicious summer soups, the Lithuanian/Polish cold borscht and Hungarian wild cherry soup, both require dollops of sour cream—a no-no for the cholesterolly challenged. Estonia’s kama (a mixture of ground and roasted grains, including pea flour) added to chilled buttermilk or kefir is healthier and a taste well worth acquiring.

The best summer option is probably fish: during a recent visit to Vincents in Riga, one of the priciest (and best) restaurants in the entire region, your columnist enjoyed an exquisitely presented starter of smoked and fresh halibut, salmon, trout, salmon caviar and herring. Sashimi, Baltic-style.

Even more striking was the dessert, concocted out of the lurid and astringent juice of the sea-buckthorn berry. This costly and vitamin-packed elixir was mixed before our eyes with liquid nitrogen, creating an instant sorbet with explosive effects on the tongue. Did someone say that east European food was boring?

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Regards

Edward

Bene Merito award

Without my foreknowledge, I was last year awarded the Bene Merito medal of the Polish Foreign Ministry. Although enormously honoured by this, I have sadly decided that I cannot accept it as it might give rise to at least the appearance of a conflict of interest in my coverage of Poland.

About me

"The New Cold War", first published in February 2008, is now available in a revised and updated edition with a foreword by Norman Davies. It has been translated into more than 15 foreign languages.
I am married to Cristina Odone and have three children. Johnny (1993, Estonia) Hugo (1995, Vienna) and Isabel (2003, London)